Hiding SharePoint Sins
April 5, 2009
Satan may be in the room, but I just learned I can make him invisible with plumbing. Read Robert Bogue’s “Using Infrastructure to Hide All Sins” here and learn how yourself. The core of the idea is that SharePoint will misbehave; that is, sin. To absolve the software of its misdeeds, the savvy SharePoint wizard will use hardware to hide the problem. Mr. Bogue wrote:
You see, I architected the system to account for a fairly high probability that the developer code would randomly and inexplicitly cause a server to crash, run out of memory, blue screen, or just generally go dark from time-to-time. With that in mind, we put two servers in that should be able to cope with the load from everyone. The third server in the farm was just there to be the token server that was in the process of crashing and coming back. Load balancing can hide almost any server stability sin that you can come up with. Simple Network Load Balancing (NLB) included in Microsoft Windows Server operating systems can hide problems. Tools like F5‘s BigIP can hide them better.
If this approach makes sense to you, then Mr. Bogue’s write up is just what the witch doctor ordered. For my money, I prefer appropriate infrastructure (low cost, reliable, scalable) and solid code. Call me old fashioned but I think at Judgment Day throwing hardware at a SharePoint problem won’t gain admission to digital heaven.
Stephen Arnold, April 5, 2009
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